Introduction

With TS3 Soundboard you can play music and sounds to your teamspeak channel. The main difference to other methods I've seen, is that you don't need any secondary machine or TS3-Instance and you don't need to fiddle with your system settings.

Once installed the plugin allows you to simultaneously play sounds and speak as usual.

Here are some more features:

Synchronizing the plugin to a media player (e.g. let the plugin play what the music player plays)

Remote control of the synchronization feature: give control to people you trust ;)

A button frame for real "Soundboard"-feeling

Playback of .wav/.mp3/.ogg/.aiff - soon to be extended by plugins (yay, a plugin that uses plugins)

Playback of Shoutcast/Icecast internet streams

Minimal support for voice effects (don't know what THAT is good for)

Installation

Since Version 0.9 the addon comes as a TS3 Plugin-Bundle that can be installed by TeamSpeak directly. Just download the file and double-click it.

After installation just (re-)start TS3 and you're ready.

Configuration

Enabling the Plugin and openening its Settings

Click Settings > Plugins to open the plugin settings dialog

On the left side tick the checkbox that says Soundbord to activate the plugin - if it isn't enabled yet.

Make sure that the Soundboard-Entry is selected and click Settings below the list.

Options

This section will describe every available option of the settings dialog. If you want to quick-start, continue reading at Setting it up.

Audio Settings

Send audio to channel

This options enables playback to the channel you're in. If you don't enable this, noone in your channel will hear what you're playing. It is good for testing your sounds locally without annoying someone else.

Changing this option will only affect new sounds / music files and not already active ones.

Play audio locally

If you enable this option, the plugin will playback the soundfiles and music to your computer. Without this option enabled (and with the Send audio to channel option enabled) everyone in your channel will hear what you play - except you.

Changing this option will only affect new sounds / music files and not already active ones.

Enable Voice Activity Detection (VAD)

This option is needed if you want to use VAD. It is important that you don't use the VAD-Option of TeamSpeak itself, because using that will interrupt playback of your sounds / music whenever you stop talking. See Enabling VAD section of this manual for further information.

Volume (remote)

Adjusting this slider will affect the volume of the playback to the channel (which you can enable via Send audio to channel). It will adjust all currently running streams of the type music and all sound and music files you will play in the future.

Volume (local)

The same as Volume (remote), except that it affects the volume of your local playback (which you can enable via Play audio locally).

Voice FX

This settings affect the voice effects that are being applied to your voice in realtime.

Warning: This might affect your latency and any echo cancelling might not work at all afterwards.

Enable VoiceFX

Generally enables (or disables) all setup effects. If you don't need any voice effects, make sure this is turned off. This will save ressources and lower the latency again.

Enable monitoring (local loopback)

Enabling this will make you hear your own voice as configured in the VFX Settings. Your voice will not be sent at all when this option is enabled.
This option will not be saved when you exit TeamSpeak.

Pitch

With this slider you can affect the pitch of your voice. Sliding to the left means your voice will sound lower, sliding to the right will make your voice sound higher.

Sync with Media-Player

Syncing to a media player will make the plugin read what's playing in the selected media player and start playback of that same file to the channel.

This option is at this time only available for the Windows versions of the plugin and only for Winamp or programs that use the same API as Winamp.

In the select box, check the player you want to sync the plugin to or -- don't sync to disable this functionality.

Announce new files

When you enabled syncing and your media player starts playback of a new file, this option will let the plugin tell everyone in your channel the title of that new track.

Allow remote control & Password

Enabling this option will allow everyone on your server that knows the set password (and you HAVE to set one for this to work) to remote control the media player via TS text chat. This is described later on.

Button-Frame

SHOW

Clicking this button will open a frame (which you can customize, see Using the button frame) containing buttons that trigger playback of files, stop playback etc.

Edit configuration

This will open the configuration file for the button frame in your default editor (for .ini-files). The syntax of the configuration file is described in Using the button frame.

Display on startup

Enabling this will automatically show the button frame when you start TeamSpeak.

Setting it up...

The plugin needs to be configured for either Push-to-Talk or Voice Activity Detection (VAD). Please choose how you want to use the plugin and follow the corresponding steps.

This steps are necessary, since the plugin and not TeamSpeak has to decide when to transmit audio from now on. (Otherwise sounds would get cut off whenever you talk or press your keys.)

…with Voice Activity Detection

This one is pretty simple.

Set TeamSpeak to use Push-to-Talk (yes, you read right) and choose a key-combination you will never ever push

Open the plugin settings and enable Voice Activity Detection (VAD)

That's it.

…with Push-to-Talk

This one is a tiny bit more complicated.

Open up your TS3-Settings and set your Push-to-Talk-Key to something you will never ever push

Click Hotkeys on the left.

Below Profile Details on the right click Add (and make sure it's not the button below Profiles).

Click Not hotkey assigned and press the Push-to-Talk key you normally use

Click on Add again and repeat the last step - except: this time you select On key release at the top of the window and choose Plugins > Plugin Hotkeys > soundboard > Release as plugin command.

You're done.

Playing back files (the real deal)

There are multiple ways to play sounds. You can either enter commands directly to your chat, you can assign hotkeys to specific files or actions, you can configure the button frame to provide graphical access or you can even bind hotkeys to those buttons.

But let's step back and clear some things up before you start.

The plugin knows two different ways to play back files:

A sound is usually a file that lasts a few seconds and will always be played as whole.

A music file is something you don't want to be played when another one is already playing. So the plugin will only allow one playback of this type concurrently. If already a music file is being played, the plugin will fadeout the old one and play the new one. Also a music file can be stopped at any point in time.

Those two types are referenced in the plugin as sound or music.

Using the chat to execute plugin commands

Type the following commands to your chat input and press enter to execute the described actions actions.

/soundboard < type > < filename >

So if you want for example play back a file at C:\MySounds\Blah.mp3, you have to type

/soundboard sound C:\MySounds\Blah.mp3

As you've learned earlier: If that file that is to be played is in fact music, you might want to enter

/soundboard music C:\MySounds\Blah.mp3

To stop playback of a music file, just enter

/soundboard stop

If you want to stream music from an internet stream (via ICE- or Shoutcast), enter

/soundboard stream < URL >

If you want to virtually click a button of the button frame, enter

/soundboard button < button number >

Binding commands to a hotkey

You might want to prefer accessing your favorite sounds by a hotkey, so this is the way to configure it:

Open up your TS3-Settings and set your Push-to-Talk-Key to something you will never ever push

Click Hotkeys on the left.

Below Profile Details on the right click Add (and make sure it's not the one below Profiles).

In some rare cases the path to a file can be too long to be saved by TS3. Try to shorten the path by copying the file somewhere else ;)

Using the button frame

By default (and since v0.9.4b), the button window will hold 10 buttons for you to configure. If you want more or less buttons, you have to follow the detailed instructions below.

Editing title, type and file of a button

Just right-click (since v0.9.4b) the button and select the option you want to change, that's it.

If you want to use multiple lines on the button, insert \n as newline character into the title.

Editing the configuration manually

Open the configuration file by clicking the button in the plugins' settings dialog.

Your default editor for .ini-files should open. If it doesn't - well, you'd have to search for the file soundboardframe.ini for yourself ;)

The file itself is written in the standard ini-Format Qt uses and not a weird idea of myself ;)

The config file contains a header called [Buttons] you shouldn't touch. Below comes the part you're interested in.

Each button you want to configure consists of several lines containing the button number and an attributes. The number is an incrementing one starting with 1, followed by a backslash. The attributes describe the filenames, the text that's to be shown on the button, the style and maybe some other things.

As said, don't touch the header [Buttons].
The next three lines describe the first button and it's assigned file, type - in that case music - and title of the button.

Important: Filenames on Windows-Systems must contain two backslashes \ instead of just one (because the backslash is used as a so-called escape-character). On filesystems where normal slashes are used, using only one is alright.

The last line

size=2

describes, how many buttons in total there are. This number has to be adjusted if you add or remove buttons.

Once you've made your changes, save the file and reload the plugin by disabling and re-enabling it. (This method will be optimized later on.)

Available attributes

title

The caption of the button. This is what's displayed on top of the button in the button frame. This attribute should always be set

type

music: a music file

sound: a sound file (see differences above)

stop: stop the track

this attribute must be present

file

The full path of the file, e.g. C:\Temp\Blah.mp3 on Windows or /home/user/blah.mp3 on *nix.

style

A style definition, similar to CSS but using the Qt-Syntax. Please google it for more info.

Advanced Settings

The configuration file should also contain a General section (at least once you've closed TeamSpeak after the first time you used the plugin), where you can specify the following settings (which all require you to reload the plugin after a change, atm.):

Name

Value

buttonWidth

the width of a single button, default is 110

buttonHeight

the height of a single button, default is 80

buttonsPerRow

the count of buttons to be shown per row, default is 5

buttonSpacing

the space between the buttons, default is 8

So the config file could contain something like this:

[General]
buttonWidth=120
buttonHeigh=80

Synchronizing to a Media-Player

When you want to use the plugin as a radio-station or "Music-Bot" you might want to synchronize it to a media player. That way the plugin tries to find out what your player is playing and does the same to your TS3-channel.

This way you can have a long playlist ready and leave it playing unattended.

To start:

Open the plugins' settings dialog

Choose a media player that you want to sync to

If you want to enable remote control, tick the option and enter a password (which is not optional!)

Open up your media player and start playing

The plugin will only play files it knows. It cannot play files that are not natively supported by the plugin - even if the media player can actually play it.

Remote-Controlling the Media-Player

So you've enabled the sync-function and entered a password. Now give the password to the people you want to be able to control your media player.

They can then open up a text chat with you and enter one of the following commands that are prepended by the password.